With increased use of electronic communications, email has become a critically important service for many companies. However, for many individuals, the growing volume of email they receive on a daily basis is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. In particular, the increased volume of email communications can make it difficult to follow the thread of an email conversation or discussion.
An email typically includes a subject field that contains one or more strings identifying the topic of the email. When an email is issued in reply to a first email, the subject field of the reply email may start with the string “Re: ” followed by the contents of the subject field of the first email. Only one instance of the string “Re: ” should appear in the subject field of a reply email, since the use of other strings or more than one instance of the “Re: ” string can lead to undesirable consequences.
The subject field of an email may also start with the string “Fw: ” (when the email is being forwarded to other individuals) or other prefixes such as “URGENT: ”, “Confidential: ” etc.
The presence of prefixes in the subject field of an email (when replying to an email or forwarding an email), can make it difficult to sort emails on the basis of their subject field. In particular, the resulting list of sorted emails is typically polluted by several combinations of prefixes that prevent the rapid identification of searched emails.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,377,354 discloses a method and apparatus for prioritizing a plurality of incoming electronic mail messages according to user-created rules. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 6,154,740 discloses a system and method of displaying a sorted list, wherein the sorting operation is performed on the basis of several key fields. However, none of these documents provides a mechanism for ignoring prefixes in email to facilitate the sorting thereof.